To me, the essence of poetry is movement, the movement of words across a line, the movement of lines across a page, the movement of a poem from the poet to a reader. Along the way, there are multiple translations, the act of writing is a translation, putting what one thinks on the page, the act of reading another translation, and time is perhaps the ultimate translator of the poem.

It is perhaps because I relate poetry to movement that I primarily conceive my poems while walking. I might say lines in my head, or out loud if no one is near, or record them on my phone. I consider the unique breath-signature of a poem as its “bone,” the scaffolding upon which its length and breadth rests.  

This foregrounding of orality is related to my early immersion in the culture of Urdu poetry, as experienced at an early age through family gatherings of bait bazi, essentially a competitive exercise of memory, to the performative traditions of the mehfil and mushaira. Layered on top of a classical grounding in Ghalib, Mir and Dagh, my teenage years were spent with the poets of political protest such as Faiz and Habib Jalib as well as their Latin American contemporaries, Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz. 

In my twenties, I migrated to the US and was fortunate enough to meet and hear the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman perform. Living in New York for nearly a decade from 1988 to 1997, I encountered the work of the African American poets, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange and Lucille Clifton.

I was also influenced by the Indian-American poets AK Ramanujan, Agha Shahid Ali, and Meena Alexander, whose poetics of exile and dislocation resonated deeply with me. I began to have a sense of language not as the fixed edifice I had been taught in the classroom but rather as a shoreline that was constantly being remade. Thus began my evolution from a poet who wrote separately in English and Urdu, to writing the way I speak and think, in multilingual, polyvalent registers.

Tracing the etymology of English words to their Proto-Indo European ancestors through poetry was a kind of reclamation, reuniting origin words with their offspring brought language full circle as evoked in my poem, ‘Blood Orange’ “from narangi to narañjo & then/like an umbilical stem/the nascent n snaps/& orange rolls, round/dimpled and English/out of our mouths”.

Shifting the lens through which I view English has freed me to experiment with the architecture of a poem. This could include the use of bilingual homonyms that serve to decolonize English by inserting hidden subtexts in poems intelligible only to those who are both desi and anglophone, or breaking up the uniformity of the language by infusing it with the sonic and linguistic richness of Urdu and Hindi. Stained Glass is an example of an entire poem written around “sun,” a double meaning Urdu/Hindi word. My engagement with the Urdu ghazal is also present in my treatment of the poetic line. I often seek to subvert the basic structure of modern English poetry, that of sentences with line breaks, by asserting the independence of the line as a self sustaining unit of meaning on par with the status it enjoys in the form of the Urdu ghazal.

Out of all the language arts, I am most drawn to poetry because it is not bound by any utilitarian constraints, it celebrates our being rather than our doing, and that is its beauty.